Great post on "Stuff Christians Like" this morning. It's called "#253. Painting God mad."
The world... including far too many Christians... has an image of God as an angry, vengeful, mean old man, just waiting to "get ya" for the bad things you do and forcing you into conforming into good little boys and girls, and what I think this does is that it keeps people running away from God rather than running to Him.
"Prodigal Jon" talks about some of that in this post, and addresses a comment from a previous post in which someone had used an Old Testament example to try to instill the "fear of God" into him. It's a good read, and I won't give away any of the details of the post except to say that, of course, everything changed with CHRIST!